TechFW
Meg Renninger
Meg Renninger jokes that the process for the invention that set the stage for Southside Plants at times had her feeling a bit like Victor Frankenstein, literature’s widely-known despondent scientist.
A wildlife biologist trained in the grand expanse of West Texas at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, hub of the South Plains, Renninger had a curiosity about expanding her collection of orchids through cloning. Of course, she needed to do it economically — that is, cheaply — “because that was about my budget.”
She assembled a “fistful” of chemicals and began experimenting.
“That process took a lot of time, but I had all these Frankenstein plans that I was slowly experimenting on,” the 35-year-old says. “And when I finally came across something that I was like, ‘wow, this really works,’ I thought, I don’t know, maybe 50 other people would like it, too. When I put it up on Amazon and 200 people in the first month bought it that’s when I knew this was bigger than I thought.”
Southside Plants’ “Crazy Keiki Cloning Paste” grew like a weed, especially considering, as it turned out, the paste worked not only on orchids but the household plant.
Unlike Frankenstein, Renninger had fashioned something that created beauty for the earth and people’s lives.
That was also a viable product she could scale. Since those early days in 2018, Southside Plants grew to offer roughly 30 products in the plant tech and propagation space.
An undisclosed buyer — serial investors from Florida — recently swooped in and bought Renninger’s company for a sales price in the “low seven figures.”
Not too bad for an entrepreneur’s first exit.
“It definitely felt like the right thing to do in the last year and couple of years, honestly, that I've been working up toward this point,” she says. “I'm no longer the right person to bring the business to the next level, which requires more marketing and that is not my core strength.”
The buyers are three partners, including two sisters, with experience in e-commerce and landscaping.
The sale didn’t result in “retirement money.”
“Just pat-on-the-back and go-back-to-work money,” she says.
She’s already gone back to work. In addition to working with the buyers through an ownership and management transition, Renninger has already begun another business.
Snout and Shell will offer a unique product line for pets.
She is starting with a line of products designed to not only extend in the longevity but save the hermit crab, currently trending, apparently, as a household pet. Hermit crabs in the wild can live up to 50 years, she says, telling me something I didn’t know. “Nobody knows that,” she says. And that’s why, typically, amateur handlers are not good parents to hermit crabs.
Crabs, she says, need environments with higher humidity. “Being put in these little mesh cages is a death sentence,” she says. And these crustaceans also enough sand to burrow in order to properly grow.
“They usually are purchased for a couple dollars at the beach and they're brought home and then they die after a couple of months,” Renninger says. “Since nobody knows that they should actually be living decades, it means that they're actually undergoing horrific conditions.
“I'm working on helping to change that.”
It’s clear that Renninger’s new enterprise will likely succeed just as her first has. She has a superpower: Identifying populations of consumers whose needs are not being met.
Renninger is a client of TechFW, the nonprofit startup accelerator celebrating its 25th birthday this year. She joined because at some point in the formation of Southside Plants she “had hit the limit of my business knowledge.”
At TechFW, she found the mentors she sought out who could help her understand business.
“Meg’s love of invention drives her forward and she has tremendous maturity knowing her strengths and how to play to them," says Hayden Blackburn, TechFW's executive director. "Founders who realize that new skills are needed to take a valuable company to the next level and actively work to achieve that transition are the kind we love supporting. Meg is a role model and a treasure trove of insights.”
Renninger, with a degree in wildlife biology, got her first job out of college in wildlife management in Battle Mountain, a gold mining town in Nevada. She “struck gold” there, she says kiddingly, playing off the town’s history, meeting her now-husband. One project she worked in, while with the U.S. Forest Service, was prairie dog capture and release.
They both had “weird” jobs in which they couldn’t get hired at the same time. He eventually landed a job in Fort Worth. It was a return home for Renninger, she having been raised in Colleyville.
She decided she was “gonna go out on my own” this time.
Renninger got a taste of the Amazon experience through retail arbitrage, the practice of taking advantage of a price different between two or more markets. In other words, reselling.
Then she scratched the persistent itch she had about her orchids.
“I guess I underestimated the demand for it,” she says of her cloning paste. “And after the first month … I was, you know, I was again the mad scientist in the kitchen until it was just, ‘this is silly. I have to get out of my own way here.’ At that point, I started working with TechFW to figure out how to scale it because I was at the end of my business knowledge. They helped me find manufacturing partners to help me scale up that recipe.
“And what it really told me is that the country's big enough for even really niche plant products. So, I started chasing after additional niche plant products because if I liked it, there were more than me out there.”